"John Lewis Gaddis is not crude, and many of his judgments are wise," wrote Catherine Merridale in the Independent, "but The Cold War is history written by the victors. Mrs Thatcher's condemnation of democratic socialism ('a miserable failure') is largely nodded through ... Perhaps this represents the post-cold war consensus, but it is not a value-free account." "This is very much an American view," agreed Mark Mazower in the Times. "Indeed, Americans generally come out smelling better than Russians. The former have principles, the latter a lust for power ... It all ends up sounding reassuringly like the triumph of virtue, but did the west triumph because of its virtue?" "This book provides a crisp, salutary reminder of how vast were the stakes in the east-west conflict," rumbled Max Hastings in the Sunday Telegraph. "The west did some wretched things in the cold war. At the last, however, our side represented the forces of good, and the world has lasting cause to be thankful for their triumph."

"Ariel Levy is clever, coherent and cross, which makes Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture an exciting read," said Mary Wakefield in the Daily Telegraph, although in conclusion she reluctantly parted company with the American feminist. "I wholeheartedly support Levy's attempt to stop teenagers becoming Female Chauvinist Pigs, and to wake women up to the fact that lap dancing isn't obligatory," she said, but in the end "women always will get a kick out of pandering to male fantasies". "Levy's book is timely," wrote Gaby Wood in the Observer. "Women, she learns, are 'redefining themselves' ... they are 'transcending' feminism or commenting on it, [but] all this has more than a whiff of the emperor's new thong about it and this 'new feminism', as Levy puts it, looks very much like the old objectification".

Ismail Kadare's new novel The Successor deals with the sudden death in 1981 of Mehmet Shehu, political heir to the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. Did Shehu commit suicide or was he murdered? "Out of this banal political mystery Kadare has constructed a masterpiece about the misery and grandeur of the human condition," declared Alberto Manguel in the Financial Times. "In a stifling atmosphere of distrust, five characters caught in a story not of their making attempt to make sense of the unravelling plot." "You don't need a degree in Balkan studies to be gripped by this story," said Tom Deveson in the Sunday Times. "Above all, Kadare creates a haunting sense of the absurd." "The reader feels a progressive tightening around the chest," gasped Murrough O'Brien in the Independent on Sunday, "you want to get out, you almost want to scream ... The horror of a world where the only law appears to be the will of the dictator, rises in a choking miasma from the pages."